Betsy Beekeeper's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

Betsy woke before dawn and walked the field with a flashlight. The mound had dropped another three inches in the night. Only one edge still held its shape — a soft hump of earth crowned with pink blooms, the slope beneath it crumbling in slow flakes. Petals lay scattered on the dirt like spilled paint. She knelt and counted the flowers still standing. Forty-six. Two days ago there had been over a hundred. The bees would lose them within the week, and she would lose the only honey that had ever tasted like the one she wanted to make. Watching the mound fail was no longer enough. She had to take the flowers off it before it swallowed them. She drove to town and came back with bags of rooting compound, plastic trays, a roll of misting line, and four panels of secondhand glass. She set the glass up against the south wall of the shed and framed it into a small lean-to greenhouse, sealing the seams with caulk. Inside she laid the trays on a board across two sawhorses and ran the misting line from a barrel. By noon the little house smelled of wet peat. She pulled on her gloves, took a clean knife, and crossed the field to the dying mound. She worked through the afternoon. She cut stems above the leaf nodes, dipped each one in rooting powder, and pressed it into a tray cell. She lifted whole clumps where the soil was loose enough to hold the roots, and carried them back in a flat box. Outside the lean-to she set up a second bed in open ground — a raised frame of boards filled with the same compost, a windbreak of burlap on the north side. She transplanted six of the strongest clumps there to test whether the flowers would take to open soil. By evening one of them had already opened a fresh bloom, its pink petals folded around a deep red center she had never seen on the mound. The flower had changed in the new soil. She stood over it a long minute, then went back for more cuttings. She worked until her flashlight beam was the only light in the field. When she finally stopped, the mound was a sunken bowl with a few bent stems still clinging to its rim. Eighty-three cuttings stood in the trays. Six clumps stood in the outside bed. She washed her hands at the barrel and felt them shake under the cold water. The flowers were off the mound. Whether any of them would root, she would not know for a week. But the bees would have something to fly to past Friday, and that was the question she had come out here to answer. She closed the lean-to door and walked back to the shed to watch the hives through the night.